In September, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, initiated an investigation of Planned Parenthood's financial records looking for misappropriated federal funds and requesting paperwork going back over 13 years. This Republican vendetta against Planned Parenthood is part of a larger fight in which Republicans are trying to prevent women from being in control of their reproductive health. To that end, House Republicans introduced a multitude of bills and amendments since January that would chip away at women's reproductive rights by eliminating Title X funding, defunding Planned Parenthood, imposing harsh restrictions on funding for abortions, replacing sexual education programs with abstinence-only programs, redefining rape to limit abortion exceptions, reinstating the global gag rule, supporting crisis pregnancy centers and imposing harsher parental notification laws.

As Republicans risk massive uncertainty for small businesses by playing chicken with the debt ceiling, Political Correction takes a look back at GOP leaders from the House and Senate bemoaning the risk of uncertainty for job creators in order to push the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

At the 2011 Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C., Political Correction asked Republican leaders if they support cuts to Medicaid in order to address the national deficit. Here are their responses:

With a government shutdown narrowly averted this weekend, the Sunday shows focused naturally on spending issues. On CBS, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) made the absurd assertion that government spending caused the recession (and not rampant fraud on Wall Street), and falsely claimed that a balanced budget amendment would help our fiscal situation. On Fox, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) repeated a favorite GOP lie about entitlement programs — that they "are not gonna be there for me when I retire" unless voters allow conservatives to rip holes in the safety net. And on NBC, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) misled viewers about his budget proposal that would undo safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps while cutting taxes for the richest Americans and protecting special interest tax loopholes for Big Oil. Meanwhile on ABC, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) seemed to have forgotten that he voted in February to eliminate all Title X funding for family planning services.

In a one-minute speech at the outset of today's House session, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) predicted President Obama will portray the past two years of economic policy as "pulling the economy back from the brink," and disagreed with that view of the recent past. "Far from pulling our economy back, the weight of debt and taxes and regulation have stifled our economic recovery," Pence said. "Mr. President, we will not win the future with the failed economic policies of the past." Yet the private sector has added jobs each month for the past year, for a total of 1.3 million new private jobs in 2010. This steady job growth stands in stark contrast with the 800,000 job losses per month — a product of President Bush's "failed economic policies of the past" — that greeted President Obama at the start of his term.

Last January, Republican message maven Frank Luntz released a memo advising the GOP that "the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout." With Democrats pushing to reform the casino-style practices on Wall Street that led to the recession, Republicans dug in and attacked the effort as a "permanent bailout" at every opportunity, but the bill became law last July. Now Republicans are talking about repealing the bill, and recycling the "permanent bailout" lie in the process. Today on C-SPAN, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) used Luntz's language to call for repeal, but the fact remains that the law actually ends the bailout culture — which is why Wall Street started giving money hand-over-fist to Republicans like Pence in the last election cycle.